Candy Bunny Reader

  Oh my, this was disappointing... Watch Over Me by Nina Lacour is a YA magical realism and character-driven book about a girl named Mila who just aged out of the foster system. She finds a job working as a teacher in a small remote farm somewhere in California. As she gets to know everybody there she finds out that the farm is haunted by ghosts, and these ghosts force her to confront her dark past. This sounds like a really interesting premise, right? Well, unfortunately this is one of those books where the first half is really good, and the second half is where it completely falls apart. I can't get too much into detail because it would go into spoiler territory, so I'll try to keep it as vague as much as possible. Here's what I liked: The themes of trauma, grief, and healing Mila's big sister-little brother dynamic with one of the younger kids on the farm named Lee. There is some queer representation Now what I didn't like: Ok. Seriously. The farm Mila goes to l...

  Now this is a book that lives up to the hype! The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is about a group of space travelers in a spaceship called the Wayfarer who have been selected to create a space tunnel between two planets that recently had a war with each other in hopes to bring peace. The setting is in the far future where Earth has become mostly inhabitable and many humans have left Earth to go live on other planets (mostly Mars). Those humans are called Exodans, by the way. However, the real focus of the story is about the relationships (friendship, family, and romantic) between our main space traveling team and the wordbuilding as they visit and talk about many different planets along the way. The cast is as follows: Rosemary, a human from Mars who gets to work on the Wayfarer as a clerk and is trying to escape her dark past. Then there's Ashby, another human who is the stern but kind captain of the Wayfarer, and is in a relationship with the captain of a...

  I also happened to read and finish We Are Okay by Nina LaCour this past week. It's a YA Contemporary novel exploring grief and loneliness.  The main character, Marin, a college freshman living in New York, gets special permission to stay at her dorm room over winter break while everyone else is gone, the only other person in the building being the housekeeper, Tommy. Marin does not want to go back to visit her home in San Francisco for some reason. Marin is forced to face her past when her best friend (and ex-girlfriend) Mabel comes to visit. Mabel wants to know why Marin has avoided her since they graduated high school, to the point of moving across the country and avoiding her texts and calls. Over the course of the book we learn what happened to Marin and the big turning point that made her want to leave everything behind.  The book is written with chapters alternating from the present day to flashbacks of Marin's life in San Francisco. We learn that she was raised ...